Earning It
We talked way back in Will Grind for Rez about different ways to conceptualize XP. It may seem weird that killing random monsters advances you down the path to enlightenment, but I’ve come to believe that explaining that sort of story weirdness is actually a worldbuilding opportunity it disguise. Yadda yadda. Go read the older comic.
What I really want to talk about today is the concept of mentors and masters in RPGs. Clerical gods and warlock patrons don’t quite count here. Those are more like absentee players in your PC’s life, consigned to the distant shores of High Level Play and otherwise a step removed from your day-to-day life as an adventurer. When I say “mentors and masters,” I’m talking about the long-bearded old loons who trained your eager young mage. I’m talking about those one-armed fencing masters who secretly taught your warrior princess swordplay under a disapproving queen’s nose. I’m talking about Ancient Master up there in today’s comic, and all of the Wuxia tradition he represents.
These kinds of NPC often die in your backstory, providing you with the motivation to go out and kick evil’s ass on the road to vengeance. They can also serve as your conceptual home base, allowing you to return to your starting village (or its sci-fi equivalent) throughout the course of your adventures. You can try to surpass your master, seek their wisdom, or watch them become the BBEG when they attempt to harness powers not meant for mortals.
Masters have the additional benefit of being tied mechanically to your character. Any backstory NPC can serve as a source of inspiration, but few are so closely aligned with your powers and abilities. The metaphor of XP, leveling, and personal growth is central to the master/apprentice relationship, and will remain relevant from level 1 to level 20: “Level 13, eh? At last you are ready for the secret Tongue of the Sun and Moon technique!”
So if you haven’t rolled with this kind of NPC in a while, give it a once-over in your next campaign. It’s one of the most versatile NPC types out there, and can serve as a foil or complement to almost any kind of PC.
Question of the day then. Have you ever had a noteworthy master/apprentice relationship in a game? If you’re a GM, have you ever used that relationship to good effect in your campaign? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Hmmm… I’ve had one. The father and mentor of my ranger friend was kidnapped, and we got in some decent roleplaying both investigating and after finding him. It was awhile ago, so I don’t remember much.
I will likely soon have another experience with a master-apprentice relationship. The bad spells wizard that I’ve created was taught his wizardry by an extremely drunk wizard who really didn’t know what he was doing. I hope that the stars (and DM) align so that I might role-play in a meeting of two wizards of questionable power.
Sort of a Horace Slughorn / Voldemort situation there with the bad spells wizard? Or are you doing a hapless “I didn’t know it was evil!” sort of setup?
By bad, I don’t mean evil. I mean that both of us know spells like jump, arcane lock and expeditious retreat. So it’s a sort of idiotic duo set up, except that the idiots also happen to be magic.
Eh, the only real master apprentice relationship a character of mine has had was with a old cleric of tamora and retired dino rider who helped train my young character in both. He ended up helping a bit in the actual game besides just the backstory with some adventuring advice on some dangers we might face in the jungle, but besides that didnt do much.
Too bad. That seems like exactly the kind of dude that would bequeath his old [insert holy relic here] on you for finding his pining dino a new mate or whatever. Quest hook city right there!
I’ve been working on a character for a large play by post game I,got invited to. It’s mostly limited to core rules but there are a bunch of house rules, including a bloodwitch class that I’m using. One of the features is that the witch can bind a former witch to their animal companion to help guide them. I’ve been planning on making it be the spirit of my former mentor who tragically died before my training was completed and my powers manifested. There gonna travel with me and give advice and try to tone back my sillier (read stupider) impulses. The part I’m looking forward to is that I’m already picturing petty squabbles as they try to correct little things and end up arguing like an old married couple. Specifically I’m picturing scenes like they have between Magarret and Danno in the newer series of Five-o.
Nice! I remember Laurel having a great time with the mentor/mascot thing in her Sentai Dragonblooded Exalted 2e game. Right after the party found their warstriders (read: Zords) their former team leader NPC got turned into a wombat. It takes some of the sting out of being told what to do by a superior officer NPC when they have to mime it in adorable wombat gestures.
Hapless Hero: “What do you mean we weren’t supposed to charge at the monster and wreck up half the city? That’s what Officer Wombat explicitly told us to do!”
Wombat: *facepalm*
Not a in-game relationship, just anecdotes.
“When I was in basic, da’ drill-seahgeant was da’ meanest asshole Moradin evah put on one leg. E’d lean on ‘is desk with both hands, and swing ‘is leg at yez. Then, when yez was standing theah dumbfounded dat a one-legged man ‘ad kicked yez, ‘ed bite yez.”
“Don’t go chahgin in dick-foist. We loind dat da hahd way in Paladin trainin’. Any time I was gonna’ make a tactical errah in the trainin’ exahcizes Commandah IronBlood would whack me in da stones. She hit hahd too. She’d say Girl voice “Any tahctical errah on yez paht endangahs everyone soivin undah yez. Yez have a responsibility ta dem to not fuck up!””
Lot of physical abuse going on in the Dwarven military. They haze you by making you drink moose piss so that if you’re ever in non-Dwarven lands you’ll be able to stomach the taste of their alcohol.
How… How does one harvest moose piss?
He didn’t ask. Presumably “Moose harvesting” is how they punish major screw-ups.
I am not certain this is what Tolkien had in mind about Sub-creation offering “a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image.”
Player wise, I’m in a long running game where my character found an immortal mentor (mythic tiers, hell of a time) who agreed to train my guy, under the condition my guy kills him later. So… looking forward to that fight.
DM-wise, one of my players has a wild magic sorcerer that we’ve worked out was trained by an evil mage hoping to manipulate him. But the student is oblivious to it, and the evil mentor eventually scrapped that particular plan, and even developed a soft spot for the knucklehead.
Oblivious and kind-hearted sorcerer sways evil master from the path of evil? I dig that a lot actually.
I’ve had a master-apprentice relationship, in the very first campaign I ran. I had only a single player, who was playing a kind of sorcerer. His mentor was, of course, an old and wize wizard.
At the beginning, the wizard gave him some errands to run here and there, and one day, after returning from one, the sorcerer found his master gone. Which led to more adventures to figure out what happened, of course.
I’ve got to say, while I hit pretty much every possible cliche with that campaign, it WAS a good NPC. Masters/mentors are basically plot hooks bought in bulk.
More recently, in my current campaign, one of my player is playing a secretely lawful evil character. He was sold to a devil as a kid, who raised/enslaved him, and is now using him as an agent of sorts. So now the character is currently using the group to gather means to emancipate himself, while pretending to serve his master’s will, while pretending to be an ally to the group. It’s neat.
Plot Hooks Bought in Bulk” sounds like a good name for a gaming blog. 😛
Do you have any idea which way double agent character is actually leaning, or is it destined to be a big surprise?
Well, the player will move abroad soon, so I’ve actually been planning the “finale” with him!
The character has been gathering some artifacts for his master – except he also secretly studied them. Next session the party will find a friendly celestial, which will give them some exposition about the overall plot… But before it can finish, the character will use the artifacts to kill it and siphon it of its power.
With this power, he will kill his devil master and take his place. He will then keep accumulating more power in order to secure his new position, since the other powerful devils are sure to take notice. This will make him the campaign BBEG, as the rest of the party will want to stop him not only for revenge but also for the security of the continent as a whole.
Neat! Just make sure to foreshadow it a bit. You always want the players to feel like they should have seen it coming with this sort of thing.
Good luck with your new BBEG, and happy gaming!
Wow, many people here have got some master to their pc. I never liked the idea, i prefer a self-teached pc, also taking in account my personality in any game i have a mentor it will end like a sith mentoring program, one of the two dead and the other rising triumphant. It say many thing about my iconoclastics ways that i can convert any master-apprentice in any setting, in a star wars master-aprrentice rivalry followed by a duel to death. Still some of my pc have had apprentice of their own.
Once some time ago in a… Pathfinder game? I was plating a necromancer and he was a good guy, he used part of his easy-earned gold to build a orphanage, and just in time to many parent of young kids in the village where the party lived to die, in mysterious, curious and accidental ways. In any case my pc was very happy, he haved a home for all that children and plenty of stock to choose apprentices, teaching they necromancy and the ways of the Whispering Way, and select investigation materials. Happy days for my necromancer.
Think it could be an interesting challenge to try for a non-adversarial master/apprentice relationship, or is that just unappealing to you?
I dont know, i tend to play evil characters, but still sometimes, very few but some anyway, i play good characters. If i can’t play evil i stick to neutral. So sometimes i make changes and exceptions. It is not fun if you ever play the same, an issue i know and try to avoid. A master-apprentice ralationship, it is not my thing, that say, it can be my character thing. I really don’t know why, but i tend to have really poor relationships with any kind of mentor figure, in games at least. You know the D&D 3.5E Warlock was my favorite edition class, 4E & 5E, are not. Why? Because the 3.5E warlock’s power come from within him, 4&5E come from someone else, you own your power to some eldritch being, that is something i don’t like. Don’t take me wrong the 5E warlock class is not bad, but that little change, kinda don’t like it. The same with a mentor, yeah i know is something dumb and a thing you can easly change with some talk with the DM, but i think all this is some quirk on my personality. Some people get super-strenght, other people gets explosions, other people is afraid of wholemeal bread, i just sometime get off for certain things.
I think I understand where you’re coming from here. If you want to RP a badass fantasy hero, it’s no fun owing your success to a game of “Mother May I” with an outsider. It ought to be you that saved the day, not some random Arch Fey that never actually appears in the campaign.
Yeah, something like that. For me it is something like a situation of “You have all this land and power, because your grand-daddy saved the king from some assassins while he was in the bath” versus “You have all this land because you conquered it and even the king is afraid of you”. It is a matter of being a self-made man versus you just all this because of X your mentor/tutor/master/other. In any case this situation still can be a good roleplay hook. The hero is sweeping the floor whit monsters thanks to his family heirloom armor and weapons, someone point that and then the doubt creeps on. Is he just a hero for his family fortune and items or for his own merits. Add a little teen or young-adult angst and great session indeed.
I have and amusingly this actually came out of the 3.5 Mentor feats because…. cheese. Basically I wanted my Beguiler to have access to more spells and nothing says your mentor NPC has to have a build that would make any dang sense for a PC.
But that aside, well it really lead me down the path for the character’s backstory. I had to figure out why my orphan character had a powerful and weirdly diverse arcane mentor and what kind of society that character fit into…. which lead me to making up an entire nation and its very odd (in universe and out) culture.
The result was a magiocracy (a meritocracy but focused mainly on magic). I know this concept is hardly new, but I went all the way with it. The powerful were allowed to do whatever the rest of society would let them get away with. But not in the “the powerful can do whatever they want and everyone else has to shut up and deal with it” way. Because while they could do whatever they felt like…. anyone or any group of anyone’s could also respond however they wanted, which put checks on everyone but still was really fluid in who was allowed to get away with what. And also differing from the standard “magic guys are in charge” stye of thing, it truly was a meritocracy at heart. As a society they wanted to reward striving for power and skill. So even though they had a system of slavery, even slaves were treated well and educated and could pull themselves out of slavery if they proved they were worthy.
Which was a real amusing juxtaposition to the other nations of the setting where slavery was illegal but were largely monarchies with serfs who weren’t particularly educated and had no realistic ability to improve their lots in life.
I had a lot of fun with the whole “your alignment/moral setup is different than mine” with my character in that game.
And all of that came out of wanting to cheese a bit and make sure I had other things than just illusions and enchantments to cast since as great as those are, there are plenty of situations where they’re completely worthless.
I think we build characters in much the same way. I love watching mechanics feed back into story and vice versa. You seem to get the most interesting characters that way.
My first Pathfinder character actually had something akin to a mentor! A rather eccentric and dramatic theater-nerd/ex-adventurer/spymaster/bard-extraordinaire/overly-rich-person. It was actually her employer, who found her on the streets and taught her the secrets of the trade, aka being a spy.
But most importantly, he taught her how to be fabulous. Replacing those dirty rags with fancy and luxurious dresses. Gotta blend into those dinner parties somehow.
I think their meeting was actually the first character-related short story I wrote, it’s all quite nostalgic and emotional now~
Unfortunately that campaign ended abruptly before he could show up in-game! I was actually looking forward to seeing my GM roleplay him :p
Very cool! Clearly I’m not the only one who finds inspiration in the Mentor figure. Your setup reminds me a bit of that Sean Connery / Catherine Zeta Jone relationship in “Entrapment.” That could have been a cool one to play. Sad times that you never got the chance.
Totally stealing the one-armed fencing master for my Princess Tara. 🙂
Do it up. 🙂
His name shall be Asmus and will be the king’s best friend since childhood. He loses the arm when saving the king from a kidnapper when they were teens.
The servant/patron relationship of a warlock is one of my favourite aspects of the class, and in the case of Cassia the bladelock, it was a mentor/student relationship too. Much of her motivation in doing the guy’s bidding was on the promise that she could eventually join him in demigodding some day (well, after he had ascended to full-God, probably).
I wrote some fun material to give flavour to their relationship prior to the game, but unfortunately I think I rather intimidated the DM by putting so much detail into the mentor character. She made him disappear pretty early on as a motivation to my character, but I think she mostly didn’t want to have to act him for fear of getting him wrong.
I had someone try to argue against the concept of XP, under the premise that NPCs would all “HAVE to be at least 4th level fighters or something”
The idea is that farmer bob deals with basic hunting and fending off wolves as a natural part of his lifestyle, etc. Those are worth XP, therefor he would have to gain enough XP to get from level “0” to level 1 and so on from there.
Of course he got almost universally panned as ignorant. People cited the various NPC specific builds, such as “soldier” “assassin” “priest” (instead of cleric) and/or “cultist” He tried to argue that NPCs are given Adventuring levels all the time by DMs, so what’s the deal holding back farmer bob?
His argument was badly formed, but it allowed me the breakthrough I needed for how I conceptualize XP:
Being an adventurer isn’t a collection of skills; it’s a state of mind that LEADS to those skills. Just like great composers could look at a random series of lines and dots, and be inspired to create a masterwork composition, a pro xtreme skater could see those same lines and come up with a wicked new stunt routine based on them.
Even if a Wizard hits a wolf with a staff in order to kill it, he still gains XP as a Wizard, not a Fighter. That’s because what MAKES him a Wizard is that he somehow incorporates the experience of fighting that wolf, regardless of what techniques he used, into some form of magical development.
That state of mind is a form of enlightenment and it can happen to anyone at any time. (of course that doesn’t mean it will or even CAN happen to EVERYONE) That’s why you can have a 17 year old street urchin with a penchant for bullying other urchins as a 1st level fighter, but so can a grizzled 50 year old war veteran. The war veteran may have combat experience, but that’s NOT what makes him a FIGHTER.
That’s also why you don’t necessarily have to go through some complex ritual to multiclass into a bard or a warlock or a sorcerer or whatever. You don’t need to have been trained in it specifically. RPing the pursuit of those multiclass skills to demonstrate that your character’s mental aptitude would be receptive to that class’s skillset before you take it, is still preferred though.
Adventurers really ARE a step above the normal commoners, and it’s not BECAUSE they have the skills, but rather they have the skills because of it.